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.htmlwatching your employer. Barrons? Why? What had he learned? Something that might help me sort through my own worriesabout who and what he was? My uncles are collectors.Everything they ve been trying to collect for the past few years your employerhas been going after, too.Some of it he s gotten, some of it my uncles have gotten, and still other itemshave gone to a third party. He withdrew a file from his notebook and handed me a magazine foldedopen to a page. Is that Jericho Barrons? A brief glance was enough. Yes. He was nearly lost in the shadows, standing behind a group of men,but the flash had caught his face at just the right angle to bathe it starkly in light.Though the photo wasgrainy, there was no mistaking him.Barrons is unusual.He says his ancestry is Basque and Pict.Criminals and barbarians, I d mocked when he d told me.He certainly looks the part. How old would you say he is? In this picture? No, now. He s thirty.I saw it on his driver s license. His birthday was coming up; on Halloween he d bethirty-one. Look at the date on the magazine. I flipped to the cover.The photo had been taken seventeen years ago, which meant he d been thirteen atthe time of the photograph, if the date on his driver s license was to be believed.Obviously, it wasn t.Nothirteen-year old boy in the world looked that mature.Christian handed me another magazine, this one featuring a gathering of wealthy socialites at a gala at aBritish museum.Again, Barrons was unmistakable in it, even half turned as he was from the camera.Same hair and faultlessly tailored clothing, same expression on the haughty old-world face: a mixture ofboredom and predatory amusement.I flipped to the cover.This photo had been takenforty-one years ago.I flipped back to the photo andstudied it carefully, looking for anomalies.There were none.It was either Barrons, or he had agrandfather who d been his identical twin, and if this was Barrons in the photo, he was currentlyseventy-one years old.Next, Christian passed me a photocopy of a newspaper article with a faded black-and-white photo of agroup of uniformed men.Barrons was the only one not wearing a uniform.As was the case in the lasttwo photos, he was angled slightly away, as if trying to slip off before the shot could be snapped.And, aswas the case in the last two photos, he didn t look a day older or younger than he did today. Do you know who that is? Christian pointed to the big, rawboned, thirtyish man in the center of thephotograph.I shook my head. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Michael Collins.He was a famous Irish revolutionary leader. So? He was killed in 1922.This picture was taken two months before he died. I did some rapid math.That would mean Barrons wasn t seventy-one, he was an extremely wellpreserved one hundred and fifteen. Maybe he had a relative, I offered, with a strong geneticresemblance. You don t believe that, he said flatly. Why do people do that? Say things out loud they don t evenremotely believe? He was right.I didn t believe it.The pictures were too identical.I d spent enough time with JerichoBarrons that I knew the way his limbs moved, the way he stood, the expressions he wore.It was him, inall those pictures.Inside, a part of me went very still.Barrons was old.Impossibly old.Being kept alive by Gripper possession? Was that possible? Arethere more of these? I wondered how far back Christian s uncles had traced him.I wanted to take thesephotographs with me, slap them against Barrons chest and demand answers, even though I knew I dnever get any.He glanced at his watch. Yes, but I have to go. Let me hold on to these a few days. No way.My uncles would kill me if Barrons got his hands on them. I relinquished them reluctantly.I could begin research of my own, now that I knew what to look for.Iwasn t sure I needed to.What difference if Barrons were a hundred, a thousand, orseveral thousand?The point was: He was inhuman.The question was: How bad was whatever he really was? I m leaving for Inverness tomorrow and won t be back for a week.There are.things at home I needto take care of.Come and see me next Thursday.I believe you and I can help each other. He pausedthen said, I believe we mayneed to help each other, Mac.I think our purposes may be tied together. I nodded as we walked out, although I had my doubts.I d been turning into a real bottom-liner latelyand, regardless of how much Christian might know, or his involvement in maintaining the walls betweenrealms, or how much I might enjoy his company, the bottom line was he was a man who couldn t see theFae, and that meant, in a fight, he d be a liability, one more person I d have to worry about keeping alive,and lately, I was having a hard enough time keepingmyself alive.I shouldered past tourists, wound my way between Rhino-boys and assorted Unseelie, and was a fewblocks from the bookstore, passing one of the countless pubs that characterize Temple Bar, when Iglanced in the window, and there she was.Alina.Sitting with a group of friends in a low-backed corner snug, tipping back a bottle of beer.Lowering itand laughing at something the guy next to her had just said. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlI closed my eyes.I knew what this was, and he needed to get some new tricks.I opened them andglanced down at myself.At least I wasn t naked. V lane, I said.Did I ever have a bone to pick withhim! MacKayla. Ignoring the reflection of the tall, erotic golden creature behind my shoulder, I focused that ancient, alien,sidhe -seer place inside my brain on the illusion:Show me what is true, I demanded.The vision of Alinaruptured with the suddenness of a bubble bursting, revealing a group of boisterous rugby players toastingtheir latest victory.I turned and was slammed upside the head with death-by-sex Fae.My knees got soft, my nipples got hard, and I wanted sex on the sidewalk, sex bent over that nearbycar, sex up against the wall of the pub, and who cared if my naked petunia got smashed up against thewindow for all to see in the process?V lane is a prince from one of the four Seelie Royal Houses, and it s difficult to look at him directly whenhe s in high glamour.He s gold and bronze, velvet and steel, and his eyes blaze with the stellar grandeurof a wintry night sky.He is so unearthly beautiful that it makes a part of my soul weep.When I look athim, I hunger for things I don t understand.I ache to be touched by him.I m terrified of his touch.I thinksex with him might undo my essential cellular cohesion, and shatter me into fragments of a woman thatcould never be pieced back together again.If V lane were a signpost, it would read Abandon All Personal Will, Ye Who Tread Here, and while Inever thought much about will back home in Ashford, here I ve begun to think it s all I really have to callmy own.I tried regarding him with slightly peripheral vision.It didn t help.My clothing was painfully constricting,and I battled the overwhelming urge to remove it.Fae princes drip such raw eroticism that it provokes a woman s senses beyond anything she was meantto experience, turning her into an aroused animal, willing to do anything for sex.While that might soundlike it promises the kinkiest escapades and most incredible orgasms of your life, Fae don t grasp basichuman concepts like death.Time has no meaning to them, they don t need to eat or sleep, and theirsexual appetite for human women is enormous, all of which leads to one inevitable outcome: A womancaught in a Fae prince s spell usually gets fucked to death
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